YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin McCoy

lines on the record: 60
first: 2025-04-02
most recent: 2025-04-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And I believe that we'll shift even more of those program executive offices across DoD to that. Now that's for a Horizon 1 capability. So if something improves the way that we're doing business, if we already have it budgeted, then you can go directly to them. And there's actually an index online that shows, I think Steve Blank put it out, that says, here's what each PEO does, here's where they are, here's who you can talk to within them. The goal there, because they have fixed budgets, is finding something again to turn off because no one has runway to do three years of piloting until you transition something. If you are doing a Horizon 2 capability, we're working on a breakthrough, but it's existing technology or there is a budget line. We have now more valley of death funds than we used to. We have small business innovative research, but that's more of a door prize. You need to get to that operations and maintenance.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, you get. 100. So people have heard of Program of Record if they've worked with DoD, the Defense Department at all. And so we have 75 program executive offices. They buy at scale these PEOs are made up of program management offices. And then you have hundreds of those. Navigating that to figure out where to sell is a scale game and it's been too hard. So one thing that we've started to do within Department of Navy, we have 18 of those 75 is we've said, wouldn't it be easier if we made data-driven decisions and started treating these buys not as sacred program of record, but let's buy capability per dollar. And so our move towards military money ball has been to open up the aperture through converting programs of record and program offices to portfolios. And so we've shifted PEO digital.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want more game changers in this space, and so when we have barriers, it stops outcomes. And so, in general, we have more companies than we've ever seen before who want to work on national security. There's, in general, recognition that this world can be a dangerous place. And the more secure we are, the better we are at this, the more overmatch there is, the more that we can have peace through strength. And this is, in my opinion, probably the best alignment that we'll have in our lifetimes. This is potentially a century anomaly for actually being able to divest. It's very hard to turn things off and then bring new players in and bring new waves of ultimately positive disruption through and through. And so that translation piece has been very expensive. And so product market fit is slow. And at times we turn away companies that would have brought in breakthroughs, but only superior military technology can credibly deter war.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On how you connect mission with buying things. And all of that is still the rules that we live under and everything since then's been duct tape and bubblegum. So what we are trying to do is instead of MacGyvering our way through that, which all of us have spent a lot of time doing, we are trying to like sort of Domocles cut through all of it, get rid of all of this extra bureaucracy, work with the Hill so that it's not a black box. It's like the 12-step program. If you can't admit there's a problem, you can't actually solve the problem.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk Lexicon first. And I know it's a little bit bureaucratic, but I think it's important. So, startups generally focus on the RD side. So they're taking a concept up through some type of development into that golden minimally viable product phase. And the P is really important because it's not mentally viable prototype, which I think a lot of DoD thinks about in terms of like, hey, that sort of looks like it's useful. But what startups are thinking about is, hey, what's that first product that I can productize and get to market? For that phase, the DIUs, the works, whether it's AppWorks or softworks or EagleWorks, like all of these different organizations, that's exactly where we want them to be. The reason I say that is because the DoD is a black box. And I say that meaningfully because we are trying to fix it. That black box was set up on purpose because in the 60s and 70s coming out of the Cold War and all the way up to the 90s, we had all these different things. The Packard Commission for how you think about buying things, the Clinger Cohen for how you do information technology, Goldwater Nick.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Optimized or very specific goals? How do we make that a reconciled space where we can just bring the biggest outcomes to the hardest problems? And so that alignment piece to bring ultimately outcomes overmatch is our goal.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Justin Finelli, Department of Navy, so Navy and Marine Corps, Chief Technology Officer, just like Alex said, Navy's a big place. Oceans are two-thirds of the world. We want to cover as much ground as possible. And the CTO position within government came 30 years after it did private sector, right? And even later than that, after defense. This is really a late acknowledgement or a nod that commercial technology can be a disruptive force positively for the government and that we can go much faster. But we need digital to do that. And so to Alex's point, finding innovations from non-traditional partners and at the edge and scaling those much quicker and tying it to some sort of divestment because that money is locked in that three-year period where we're spending on existing tech, we're out there scouting very similar to how private sector would do. We're working with hundreds of internal organizations, in some cases with different kind of sub.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was the CTO? I was the science and technology advisor for the Army G2. That is the Deputy Chief of Staff that runs intelligence. So I was the guy doing all the technology for Army military intelligence. I got to do some pretty cool stuff, work with some really interesting people, and that was where all my downrange time was as an intelligence professional.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean by that is risk minimalists. So most of our day job is just actually going through and educating, having a unique understanding of what our job is, what the mission is, and having done it to make that connection happen.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm the CTO for the Chief of Staff of the Army, and that is a big title because the Army is a big place in my day job. It's a lot of education. It's, I would say, probably 60, 40 talking to people about what technology can do for mission, and then 40% actually hands-on putting my engineering cap back on and actually doing things that move the ball forward. I would say very similarly to a company, what I do as the CTO for the chief is think about what the North Star should be for the Army in terms of how we leverage technology, how we employ it, and then what our missions are that can leverage it, and then actually going forward and helping people get there while companies have boards of directors and presidents on all these different things. We also have a board of directors that is Congress. We also have stakeholders that are the American people. However, most companies don't have 60 years of policy and rules that were written generally by enthusiasts and visionaries, but implemented by minimalists.”
2025-04-02 · a16z Podcast · How to Build with the Department of Defense · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source